"Looking for generic campaign rules/guide" Topic

Everyone,

Me and a couple of my gaming buddies are finally going to give a campaign a try; instead of just playing one off games.

I am having difficulty finding a good set of system agnostic campaign rules to string our games together though. I was going to try a simple tree campaign where the games progress through depending on which side wins, but I am looking for something a little more in depth with some background rules for supply, maybe a map node to plan attacks etc. Just something to add a little flavour in between games.

Any suggestions would be welcome.
Thanks

Just a thought…

The mechanics of scenario generation are a set of
problems unto themselves. Perhaps a list of actions
decided by dice that is modified by the results of the
previous scenario. For example, a successful assault
may add dice modifiers to favor further offensive scenarios. Other modifiers may depend on the condition of the surviving units. If the successful side takes too many losses or is 'burnt out', it may be pulled out for refit.

Perhaps the most interesting feature would be a series of actions between scenarios. Replacements, repair, re-supply and rest may be considered. Promotions and re-organization may be in order. Fatigue, both human and mechanical could be factors. Equipment upgrades may be in order.

Just ideas, not based on any specific set of rules.

Hope these ideas may be of use.

Adapting a board game is often the easiest way to go.

Stargrunt had a pretty simple system where unit quality degrades after each battle and they have to be rotated out or there's a chance they will fall apart.

We often use a simple system where we figure out the 2-4 most likely things to happen after a battle, then assign each of them a chance and roll.

We (VBAM Games) sell the Victory by Any Means campaign system, which is a set of generic sci-fi campaign rules that you can use stand-alone (with strategic combat) or alongside your tactical rules. It is a complete strategy game, which means that it might include more elements in the strategic layer than you want to deal with, but you can always cut out the content that you don't want to use.

The First Edition is currently discounted down to $7.50 USD USD, and the new Second Edition is out this Friday (July 3) for $15 USD USD.

With the utterly shameless shilling out of the way, another approach you might try is something akin to the old Wing Commander Armada computer game worked, where the map is a number of systems connected together by a series of warp lanes and each system generates a fixed amount of points each turn that you can spend. If I remember right, I think the points banked up at each individual location, and you built one thing at a time at a set rate. There were transports that you could build that you would then use to move these resources around, in case you had a Shipyard in one system and needed to feed it resources from another system.

The Armada rules also gave each system a finite amount of resources that it could harvest before it was exhausted, which forced players to continue expanding instead of sitting and turtling indefinitely.

The victory condition in Armada was to destroy the enemy's carrier, which effectively made it a "capture the flag" style scenario.

For a simple tactical campaign, the Armada system isn't a bad one to emulate, and it was fun as a thin strategic layer to the Wing Commander space combat rules.